What the Fark is an RSS Feed?

RSS Feeds. I’m sure you’ve seen it written everywhere, but what does it mean?

As articles are published on web sites, they are archived under their own URL, or website address. Behind the scenes, the website is also making a minimal version of the articles that do not contain all the style and design that the main site has.

These minimal versions are called RSS feeds, or Real Simple Syndication. If you are using Firefox or IE, you may have already noticed that your browser can read these “feeds” from websites supporting RSS. In Firefox, you’ll notice an orange box with three wavy lines in the right of your web address bar. In Internet Explorer 7, it will light up the same orange icon on the toolbar.

The point of subscribing to websites is to allow you a quick and easy way to read new updates on your favorite sites without having to navigate to each one. Think it like almost a custom Newspaper just for you, with only the stories and topics that interest you all on one page.

There are several tools other than IE and Firefox to view these feeds, several of which are described below:

Google Reader (#1 Best Feedreader)
http://www.google.com/reader – Requires a gMail Account or Google account (both FREE–Google Accounts can use an existing email address), this web application allows you to add multiple feeds into the reader and organize them by folders. If you use the Personalized Start Page from Google, you can add an applet or widget to your page that will show you the latest updates from your Reader that you can view right from the page in little popup windows.

Google Desktop
http://desktop.google.com/ – Much like the Google Reader, you can add feeds to the “sidebar” version of Google Desktop. Desktop also indexes your hard drive, email, and instant messenger chats for easy searching.

NewsGator
http://www.newsgator.com – Another web interface news reader much like Google Reader.

Offline Newsreaders
There are several installable programs available that will also pull down the latest “RSS Feeds” from your favorite sites. Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007 have this ability built in the program, and there are several other applications available that can also accomplish this task. I personally recommend SmartReader–it’s free and simple to use, and you get little IM Popups in your taskbar when new articles are posted.

Portal Pages
(Google, Yahoo, MSN) – Most of the generic start pages offered from Yahoo or Google offer the ability to add RSS feeds to its pages. Find the URL of the feed (for The Daily Haggis, it’s http://feeds.feedburner.com/dailyhaggis) and input it when asked for.

A majority of the mainstream news sites offer RSS feeds, such as CNN or Fox News, as well as a majority of the entertainment sites, and almost all of the modern web logs. Find your favorite newsreader and start subscribing to all your favorite websites!

For more technical information about RSS Feeds, click here read the WikiPedia article on the topic.